My attitude to sex once turned someone away from Christ. She was a good friend, a single girl, and I had been one of the key people in leading her to faith in Jesus. I think it’s safe to say she trusted me. And when she started having regular, non-platonic sex with her boyfriend, I basically made her feel she had to choose between that sex and following Jesus. It got predictably ugly. Our friendship ended. She no longer calls herself a Christian.
Sex and Christian attitudes to it played a part in that, but, as I’m sure you will have guessed, the fact that I was an utter toolbag had a lot more to do with it. Today I am probably moderately less toolbaggy, and my views have changed.
At the time, I was utterly and 100 per cent convinced that, the only form of sex that was not an affront to the Lord was between a married man and woman. Not in a Woody Allen ‘you have to get between the right man and woman’ kind of way, either. To me, premarital, extramarital and any other non-marital sex were sin and thus anathema to me. In many ways I miss that attitude. Repentance from sin, wanting to please God, choosing Him above all else and in all things – they’re not a bad way to live.
Except, I didn’t.
My definition of sex was clever. Perhaps you’re familiar with it.
Sex is a penis entering a vagina. That is it. Anything else, well, sure, there may be issues of lust or purity involved, but, really, it was all fair game. I am one of countless evangelical Christians whose version of purity (which allowed me to look down on my penetrative-sex-having buddies with completely irony-free judgement) was doing absolutely everything, sex-wise, other than actually having sex.
I doubt whether it’s a coincidence that the period of my life during which my attitude to sex was at its least flexible and accommodating, my own sexual life was easily at its most chaotic and unrighteous. I cheated on every one of my girlfriends. I visited massage parlours and bought (safe, righteous, non-penetrative) sexual favours from prostitutes. I tried very hard to have casual sexual encounters (though I was disappointingly rubbish at it).
And in my mind I was still pure. I was still a virgin.
Again, in this, I have changed. Not instinctively monogamous by any means, I am, in practice these days, faithful. It’s been a process, not unlike weaning oneself off an addictive drug or building a new, better version of my self-esteem. Through the exceptional grace and forgiveness of a girlfriend who became my wife, I would say I am still an addict but it has been a long time since I had a relapse. And even now, as I write that, I wonder why I draw the line at physical encounters rather than the sins of the mind when it comes to measuring my morality.
The funny thing is, as I have made this journey (largely unconsciously, almost entirely unwillingly at the start), I have noticed a strange thing: my attitude to sexual sin has changed. Subtly, slightly, without my noticing it, something happened to me, and a year ago, when some anguished younger Christian friends confided that they had had sex (the bad-penis-and-vajajay kind), I found myself telling them it was not the end of the world. That they shouldn’t beat themselves up about it.
Today, as I find myself wanting more than ever to be faithful to one woman, I find that I have little enthusiasm for defining or even discussing sexual ‘rules’. The ‘how far is too far’ debates and virginity-worshipping purity-vows that would have been my staple as a young pervert, hold almost no meaning for me. Perhaps because I know how ineffective they were in making me a better sexual person.
I know that there must be an ideal way to have and approach sex. And I guess that it is unlikely to be promiscuity or any sexual attitude that fails to see one’s partner as a human needing love and care rather than a source of pleasure.
I’m never going to tell a virgin that they’re missing out or somehow weird. Our society does that more than enough and it displays an odd obsession with the very thing it is judging. But I am also not going to tell you that having sex with your boyfriend is the worst thing in the world. Can you get hurt and psychologically damaged by bad sex? Perhaps. But, then, that’s life. That’s relationships. The number of premarital-sex-having Christians with immense hang-ups about sex in my own group of friends is matched by those whose hang-ups have no such excuse.
If asked, I tell people to be faithful. To be truthful. To try not to hurt anybody and to always ask God what He would have them do. I remind them that holiness and righteousness are not always measurable in harm to others and I point out that selfishness is almost never good. Then I ask them what part of their lives they are neglecting while they obsess over orgasm etiquette.
I may be wrong. I have been wrong about so many things, particularly in this area. But I don’t think sex is that big a deal. Not more than our attitudes to people, the way we spend our money, the way we treat our enemies, express worship or care for the poor. If we disagree with someone over those things, or if we think they’ve failed, we don’t perceive them differently, tell them they have ‘lost’ something or act as if it is an event from which they need to recover. And when we do, even if we are right, we are likely to drive people away from bigger, better truths.
I’m not advocating relativism or hedonism. I know that repentance from sin is an essential part of the Christian life, and an unwillingness to repent on principle would have laid the blame at my sex-having, Jesus-rejecting friend’s feet.
I just think there are way more grey areas than my younger self might have wanted to admit. And I find it hard these days, knowing what I know about my own immorality (not just in sex but in selfishness, pride, anger, vanity, laziness and rebelliousness) to be terribly harsh with the horny.
Image by Jesse Therrien via stock.xchng images.